| Daryl Braithwaite | |
|---|---|
| Background information | |
| Born | 11 January 1949 |
| Origin | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Genres | Pop Rock |
| Instruments | Voice, Guitar, Keyboards |
| Years active | 1970–present |
| Labels | Festival Records (Australia), Sony Music, Independent record label |
| Associated acts | Sherbet |
| Website | darylbraithwaite.com.au |
Daryl Braithwaite (born 11 January 1949) is an Australian pop singer. Best known as the lead vocalist of Sherbet, Braithwaite has also sustained a successful solo career, placing 15 singles in the Australian top 40, including the No. 1 hits "You're My World" and "The Horses".
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Daryl, along with his twin brother Glenn, was born and raised in a working class family in Melbourne, Victoria His father was an English plumber. As a child, he attended Punt Road Primary School in South Yarra, Melbourne and then Christ Church Grammar, also in Punt Road, where he sang in the school choir, and for a time was in the same class as Olivia Newton-John.[1][2] In 1963 his family moved to the Sydney beachside suburb of Coogee, New South Wales where he attended Randwick Boys High until the end of year 10. He then began a fitter and turner apprenticeship, set up by his father, which he completed in 1969, but decided that this was not the career path for him and left home to pursue a musical career instead.[3]
By the time he was in his teens Braithwaite was singing in various Sydney rock groups, his first being Bright Lights, in 1967, then House of Bricks and Samuel Lilith. In 1970, at the age of 21, he joined Sherbet, a band that had already released one single. Initially hired as Sherbets' second lead vocalist, within a few months Braithwaite became the band's only frontman when original lead singer Dennis Laughlin left.
Sherbet's second single ("Can You Feel It Baby") featured Braithwaite's gritty-but-polished lead vocals, and became an Australian Top 40 hit in 1971. The combination of Braithwaite's soul-influenced vocal style and Sherbet's pop songcraft was then heard on a series of singles and albums throughout the 1970s, and The Sherbs ended up placing an additional 19 hits on the Australian charts from 1971-79. In the process, Braithwaite rose to national fame as the band's lead singer.
Braithwaite also forged a similarly successful solo career alongside his work in Sherbet. Working in largely the same pop/rock vein as that band, from 1974 through 1993 Braithwaite placed 15 solo hits in the Australian top 40.
Already a budding star due to his work in Sherbet, in 1973 Braithwaite played the lead role in the Australian production of the rock opera Tommy. The following year, amidst unfounded rumours that he would soon be leaving Sherbet, Braithwaite began his official solo career with a cover of the ballad "You're My World", which went to No. 1 in Australia.
More hits followed throughout the 1970s, including a cover of The Small Faces' "Afterglow (Of Your Love)". An infrequent songwriter, Braithwaite's solo career has been dominated by cover songs.
Curiously for the 'album rock' era, Braithwaite's solo recordings from 1974-78 appeared only on 7-inch singles. A 'best of' solo LP was compiled in 1978, but Braithwaite's first original full-length album as a solo artist (Out On The Fringe) didn't appear until 1979, during a time when Sherbet had briefly broken up.
He was crowned Australia's King of Pop by TV Week over three consecutive years from 1975 to 1977.[4]
By 1980, the members of Sherbet were back together and had renamed themselves The Sherbs. At this point, Braithwaite put his solo career on hold to concentrate on work with his bandmates. However, The Sherbs had only a very few minor hits and broke up in 1984.
For a period of time after the break-up, Braithwaite played regular gigs, but as of 1987, he had left the music industry and was working as a builder of footpaths for less than 200 Australian dollars a week.
In 1988, Braithwaite recorded and released his comeback album Edge. This LP featured a somewhat more adult contemporary sound than Braithwaite's previous work, and spawned four hit singles that returned him to the Australian singles charts after an absence of nearly a decade. Two of these hits, "As The Days Go By" and "All I Do", were penned by Canadian songwriter Ian Thomas; a third, "One Summer", was a Braithwaite original.
Braithwaite went on to have a number of solo hits in the early 1990s, including the Australian No. 1 "The Horses", a cover of a Rickie Lee Jones recording written by Jones and Walter Becker. He also made his first US chart appearance as a solo artist at No. 47 with the 1991 single "Higher than Hope", a song he co-wrote with Simon Hussey. By the end of 1991, Braithwaite's Rise album had become Australia's biggest selling CD of the year, and Edge had become the best-selling album ever released by Sony Music Australia to that time.
Braithwaite then worked alongside Jef Scott, Simon Hussey and James Reyne to create the 1992 album Company of Strangers. Braithwaite sang lead or co-lead vocals on 4 of the album's tracks, including two Australian top 40 singles: "Motor City (I Get Lost)" (#26, 1992) and "Daddy's Gonna Make You A Star" (#35, 1993).
His comeback success was somewhat derailed by a 1992 lawsuit, in which his former managers sued Braithwaite for back payment of fees owing. The suit was successful, and Braithwaite essentially had to give up all the revenue he made from Edge and Rise, as well as a portion of the revenue from his next album, 1993's Taste The Salt. This last-named album was only moderately successful, and after a 1994 'best-of' collection was released, Braithwaite was dropped by his record company. He did not record another album for 12 years.
He was a member of 'A Current Affair's Kokoda Challenge' in 1996, where he travelled to Papua New Guinea and did a 100 kilometre nine day trek of the Kokoda Trail with other celebrities Angry Anderson, Grant Kenny, Collette Mann and Dermott Brereton to retrace the steps of Australian Diggers to mark the end of War 51 years previously. His own father had served in Papua New Guinea during the war and he wanted to experience something of what he had to endure. He stated that it was the toughest test he has faced, "I was determined to make it, no matter what. But it was really, really hard."[5]
In the interim Braithwaite toured regularly, and in 1997 he returned to the musical theatre stage in the Melbourne production of Chess. As of 1999, he also resumed occasional touring with a reunited Sherbet.
After a more than a decade away from the recording studio, Snapshot, appeared in 2005. It included four songs co-written by Braithwaite including See You Around Sometime which was written with Mark Seymour and had been previously recorded by Seymour for his album One Eyed Man.
In 2006, Braithwaite sang on two new Sherbs tracks specially recorded for a greatest hits compilation; they were The Sherbs' first new recordings in 22 years. Braithwaite then resumed his solo career with the 2008 release of The Lemon Tree, an album of acoustic reworkings of both solo and Sherbet hits, and a few covers.
| Release date | Title | Chart Positions | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AUS | US | NZ [7] |
NOR [8] |
SWE [9] |
|||||||||
| October 1974 | "You're My World" | 1 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| August 1975 | "Cavalry" | 13 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| April 1976 | "Old Sid" | 9 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| February 1977 | "Love Has No Pride" / "Fly Away" (Double A-Side) |
5 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| October 1977 | "Afterglow (Of Your Love)" | 37 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| June 1978 | "If You Walked Away" | 14 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| January 1979 | "Why Do I Break It Up?" | 35 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| September 1979 | "Love Like A Child" | 69 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| January 1980 | "Prove Your Love" | — | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| September 1988 | "As The Days Go By" | 11 | — | 49 | — | — | |||||||
| November 1988 | "All I Do" | 23 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| March 1989 | "One Summer" | 8 | — | — | 5 | 4 | |||||||
| June 1989 | "Let Me Be" | 26 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| December 1990 | "Rise" | 23 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| March 1991 | "The Horses" | 1 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| July 1991 | "Higher Than Hope" | 28 | 47 | — | — | — | |||||||
| October 1991 | "Don't Hold Back Your Love" | 55 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| 1991 | "Scarred" | — | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| November 1991 | "Nothing To Lose" | — | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| October 1993 | "The World As It Is" | 35 | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| 1993 | "Barren Ground" | — | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| 1994 | "Breaking The Rules" | — | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| November 1994 | "How Can I Be Sure?" | — | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| 1999 | "When The Flame Burns" | — | — | — | — | — | |||||||
| "—" denotes the single did not chart or was not released in that country | |||||||||||||